A Message to
the President From a Bronx Teacher
Good
Afternoon,
Angela Davis once said, “The word
radical simply means a grasping of the root.”
By that definition, Michelle Rhee is not a radical, as her book title
suggests. I am a radical because I grasp
from the root. In our world of
education, that translates to looking to fix the origin of the achievement gap
rather than divert from it by blaming teachers for something that we did not
cause. The root of this problem is poverty.
I come from humble beginnings. I grew up in Edenwald Projects, located in
the Northeast Bronx. My living arrangements were…interesting. It was the house that my mother and her
siblings grew up in and apparently never left.
Three generations lived under one roof in our 1C apartment. The Tanner family that we watched every
Friday night had nothing on us. We were
the true meaning of a full house.
There’s a lot that comes with growing up poor aside from lack
of material things. What it often means
is ignorance. When abnormal things are
normalized in any community, it has the ability to warp one’s mentality. It is this warped mentality, coupled with the
obvious lack of resources in poor communities that account for low performing students. My mother was the only one to complete
college in her family however, she was only instructed to go in the first place
to keep her deceased father’s social security checks flowing, not because anyone valued education. I stand here today only due to a series of serendipitous
events like the one just mentioned, my mother’s incidental education. She liked children, but suffered from severe low self-esteem and didn’t
feel she was intelligent enough to teach school age children, which led to her
picking early childhood education as her major because she thought it would be easier. Being
an early childhood teacher led to her understanding the importance of educating
her own child from birth, which led to me having an edge over my peers
academically and in life. It doesn’t
make us better, it makes us lucky. A
series of serendipitous events…
Teachers are not the ones to blame for the achievement
gap…poverty is. Even with all of my
mother’s discipline, high expectations, support and teachings, I still narrowly
made it out of my own way. By the time I
got to junior high, I had developed an attitude. An attitude that I couldn’t understand at the
time but now I can trace back to being angry about things that I couldn’t
control. Sound familiar? On top of that, being a goodie goodie did not
fare well with my peers. My priorities shifted.
I deliberately learned how to speak improperly. I paid less attention to school and pleasing
teachers and more on memorizing lyrics that denigrated women because it was
cool. My mother would yell at me and say “I didn’t raise you this way.” “You’re not the only one raising me,” I
retorted. I’ll say it again, when you
live in a community where certain realities are normalized, it begins to warp
your mentality. It is this mentality and
the obvious lack of resources in poor communities that account for low student
achievement.
As early as elementary school, my best friend and I would get
made fun of for being virgins at the age of eight. We learned hand games with extremely sexually
explicit lyrics…of course most of these kids hadn’t had sex yet, but they still
knew too much too soon, which led to them having sex too soon and babies too
soon. These same girls used to see me in
the street when I came back to Edenwald to visit my grandmother—my mother and I
had moved out by then—wondering why I had not started a family yet. I was 18 and a freshman at Fordham. They were on their second, sometimes third
child.
I chronicle my childhood to offer two
points up to the Gods, that is, the policy makers to whose ears I hope are
hearing my words. Number one: I am an anomaly, a glitch in the sytem. Being a
college graduate from a prestigious university, having two master’s degrees,
having a career, these are not typical realities for a project kid. Just because it is possible doesn’t make it probable. Realities are usually far more dismal. I have family members in jail right now, family who dropped out of high
school, who were alcoholics, drug addicts, heroine being the drug of choice. He grew up during the 70s. Vietnam amputees
lined our streets, nodding in their fatigues.
We called it Bum Hill. My relative was sent to rehab several times to
get clean, only to come back to Edenwald and within weeks be at it again
because it was all around him. He’s
clean now, and has been for years…because he didn’t come back home. He
couldn’t come back home.
Immediately after graduating from
Fordham University, I began teaching in the South Bronx, which made my
neighborhood look like Beverly Hills.
Many cannot fathom the kinds of problems that our children are dealing
with. Many of them are lucky to be
alive, yet we are concerned with whether they get a three or a four on an exam.
As we continue to be used as scapegoats
for societal ills, poverty prevails.
For anyone who says teachers are to blame for our students
failing, I have one thing to say: How
DARE you? Teachers are heroes to a lot
of children who have none! The problems
of the ghetto will always be problems
of the ghetto until we begin to make changes toward fixing the ghetto. They are the same problems I saw in the
classroom twenty years ago as a student. Children who are angry and lash out because of
their home lives, distracting the entire class from learning. Children with so much on their minds, who
stare out of windows all day and never know what’s going on in the
classroom. (Those are usually the
children principals tend to ask questions to gauge whether your lesson was
effective during an observation.) Children
born in America, with American born parents, who have language issues, that do
not understand a simple question because no one talks to them at home. Parents that suffer from depression and other
forms of mental illness. Children who
live in shelters and move every few months.
Children who are neglected, who haven’t had a decent shower in days,
whose hair hasn’t been combed, teeth haven’t been brushed. Please explain to me
what you would do under these circumstances? Do you know what it’s like to have
to have a class meeting to address the bullying of the little girl who smells? Have you ever had a child ask you to wash his
clothes for him because his little nine year old hands can never get the stains
out when he washes them out by hand? Have
you ever tried to teach a child whose mother decided she was going to punish
his teacher by not giving him his meds that day? Have you ever seen a ten year
old girl get stomped out by a parent? How would you feel if you had to confiscate
the gang beads a child made using art materials provided for an art project? What do you say to a little girl whose father
was killed in front of her by the police over the break? You heard the story on the news the night it
happened. You just didn’t know it was
one of your students it had happened to. Try teaching a child who’s father just left
him and his mother for another woman the night before. Who heard his mother crying to you on the
phone that she doesn’t how she’s going to survive? Do you know what it’s like
to have to raffle off televisions and play stations to get more parents to come
to parent teacher conference? What would
you say to the little boy whose social worker just called to inform you that
ACS is on their way to pick him up at dismissal because both of his parents
have just been arrested? How do you help
the woman who has taken the children of all three of her crack addicted siblings
but cannot manage them all in one home? How
do you stop kids from talking about the police cars that are blocking the
street in front of your school because there are body parts of a slain mother
sticking out of the duffle bags that her son put them in littering the curb? What makes you think environment cannot
impact a child’s cognitive ability, language development, attention, and
motivation?
Because of the issues that plague our
community, our students have additional needs. For one, we don’t need teacher cuts. We need more
teachers. In my community, there are so
many children who are struggling readers that need small group instruction but
not enough teachers to pull those children out to give reading
intervention. As a result, these
children are classified as special education students too quickly because they
cannot read the exam and fail. If we had
more teachers to provide small group instruction prior to special education
referral, we could prevent those children from ever entering special education
at all.
Students also need more than academic instruction. As a special education teacher, it is
disturbing to see how much emphasis is placed on an exam that many of our
students cannot pass. Many of our
students need life skills, and trade skills to ensure that they can still be
contributing members of society that know how to get along with one another
because in the 21st century, something has happened to the fabric of
our nation. Morality has gone A
wall. Can we teach kids how to act like
civilized human beings who do not beat or rape or rob or shoot up schools and
communities? The death toll in Chicago equates to that of Afghanistan’s! We need something in place that will ensure
our students learn right from wrong because many are not learning it at home,
and if they are, mass media and the streets are teaching them otherwise.
They need healthier, better educated communities. They need to grow up in a place that doesn’t
normalize dysfunction. We need more
programs to help educate the people of my community, parent workshops, prison
to work programs, mental health programs, jobs and small business programs,
more affordable art and music programs. This is what kids need to see instead
of liquor stores and fast food places. You cannot change a child without first
changing his environment.
They need teachers who care. By consistently tearing teachers down,
despite our efforts, one thing that is to be guaranteed is an exodus of
teachers leaving inner city schools or the profession entirely. Micro-management of teachers will not make
them better teachers, it will make them unhappier teachers, who will begin to
hate their jobs. Micro-management of
teachers destroys the relationship that teachers have with their students, and
with each other. It is toxic to the
school environment. Teachers in schools
that are micromanaged begin moving to other schools that aren’t feeling the
pressure, schools where the stresses of a poverty-stricken community do not
exist. The ones that stick around are
shells of their former selves. They
cannot provide the same love and support that they were once able to provide
their students. They watch the clock for
dismissal.
As for all of my teachers who are present
today, let us send a message not of hate, as much as we may hate what these
policies are doing to our schools, to our children and to our own lives. While we stand here in Washington, I must quote
Dr. King’s advice to his fellow demonstrators.
“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the
cup of bitterness and hatred.” Let us send a message of love for what we do,
and for who we do it for. So for the
media trying to destroy our images, Washington and Mr. President, which by the
way, teachers, we have more in common with him than you think, we both know how
it feels to be blamed for everything. We
both know how it feels to need other players to get with the program in order
to get something accomplished. Mr.
President, I am not the enemy. I am a teacher.
I love what I do. I love my
kids. Like the teachers of Newton,
Connecticut, I’d give my life for my kids.
I have been educated and trained to no end in order to teach my kids
effectively. Some of my kids will still
fail the test, as the test only measures certain things. That doesn’t mean they aren’t all great in
some way. And it doesn’t mean that I
have failed them. Please do not diminish my impact to a test score. My kids will remember me when they’re old and
gray. They will remember they were
loved. They will remember my passion. They will remember that someone cared about
their future. Thank you.
